Alberta School of Performing Arts opening delayed

The long-awaited August 2014 opening of the Alberta School of Performing Arts has been pushed back to December.

By Jamon SmithStaff Writer | The Tuscaloosa News

The long-awaited August 2014 opening of the Alberta School of Performing Arts has been pushed back to December.Jim Ward, principal architect at WSV Architects, told the school board Tuesday that they’ve been “thrown a curve ball” in the school’s construction schedule by the Alabama Building Commission, which enforces the state building code through plan reviews and inspections.Tuscaloosa City Schools Executive Director of Facilities Jeff Johnson said the electrical engineer at the commission who was reviewing the school’s more than 300 drawings, comments and changes in the past six months, retired.A new electrical engineer has been assigned to review the school’s building plans, he said, but it’s going to take about three to four weeks for the engineer to get up to speed on the project.The delay has caused the system to push back the date that it can bid out the general construction work on the $23.9 million project.“The big problem is we only have two openings to bring the kids in — August and December,” Johnson said. “August is the beginning of school and December is the end of the first semester. We were pushing hard to get the school opened in August, but now we’ve missed that first window of opportunity.”Board members weren’t happy about the news.“We’ve been criticized by a lot of different people on what’s taking so long to get this school opened,” said Harry Lee, the recently re-elected incumbent of District 5 whose opponent in the school board race, Joe Gattozzi, often criticized the board for taking too long to open Alberta.“They need to know that it’s not us,” Lee said.Johnson said one good thing about the construction delay is that it will save the system money.“We were trying to get the school built in 11 months before,” he said. “Now it’s going to take us 14 months, so that’s less overtime we have to pay.”Alberta Elementary was the only school in Tuscaloosa County that was completely destroyed by the EF4 tornado that devastated the city on April 27, 2011. The school was also the only one that experienced the death of a student. About 60 students left the school due to their families relocating after the storm.Within a week of the school’s destruction, the majority of the students were back in class. Two weeks later, the board approved relocating Alberta’s students to an empty wing of the Tuscaloosa Magnet Schools, where they’ve held class since.In February 2012, the board approved rebuilding Alberta Elementary, but in late November that year, the board and Superintendent Paul McKendrick decided to rebuild Alberta as a pre-K through eighth-grade school with a performing arts curriculum and an emphasis on math and reading. It was later decided that the school would be open to all students in the city.Delays in the school’s construction can in part be attributed to a demographics study of Alberta to find out how many people still lived in the area and a proposed land swap with the Tuscaloosa City Council, which wanted to give the board the 7-acre site east of the school where Graceland Apartments was in exchange for the board-owned land directly north of the school so it could use it to construct houses.The groundbreaking ceremony for the new Alberta School of Performing Arts was held in late April and the site work on the 110,000-square-foot school began in June. Johnson said the school’s building pad has already been completed and its foundation will be completed in the next few weeks.